Audrey Sutherland

Audrey Sutherland was known for the swimming and kayaking adventures which she summarized in her motto, “Go simple, go solo, go now,” and chronicled in several books. She was born in Southern California in 1921, spending summers in a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains built by her father. She lost him at age 6, however, and grew up very independent. 

Sutherland entered UCLA at 16, taking a degree in international relations. She and her sister also worked as riveters on the Liberty ships being built during World War II. She married and had four children, moving to a house on the north shore of Oahu in 1952. Her husband went back to commercial fishing in California, however, while Audrey and the children stayed in Hawaii. She worked at many jobs in education and counseling, notably working with the tenth grade children of U. S. army families.

Sutherland’s published adventures began in 1964 when she explored the wild north coast of Molokai, swimming while towing her camping equipment, food and wine on a rope. It was a hallmark of her trips that Audrey never stinted on food, most of which she dried and packed herself, while also using the fish, shellfish, seaweed and mushrooms she found along the way. Identifying wild food and monitoring it, along with water, for pollution were among the survival skills she learned and then taught to many others. Good wines she labeled and packed in 35mm film cans!

At 60, Sutherland planned a trip along the inside passage in southeast Alaska, island hopping from Ketchikan to Skagway, 850 miles, which became the book Paddling North. This book is a powerful, yet humble, account of the trip in her yellow rubber blowup kayak which she could pack into a duffel, yet load with supplies for many weeks, bottles of wine stowed fore and aft. It begins with the topographical maps she orders, choosing a route and convincing herself to go.

“On all my expeditions,” Sutherland writes, “I’ve kept a daily log. Not just the sailor’s course and weather, but also the thoughts, the small events, the jeering at myself and some detailed drawings. Long ago recollections are always distorted. Time empurples the prose and the only reality is recorded within a day or two. The writer will need to satisfy the grey, fragile lady at age 90 reading her memoirs from these salty pages.”

Not mincing words about the wind, cold and damp, Sutherland asked herself why she kept coming up to southeast Alaska (as she did for the next 20 years), when her home in Hawaii was in the most marvelous of all climates. “Because it isn’t overrun with people,” is the answer. In Paddling North, Sutherland details many interesting encounters with fishermen, students, park rangers. But her most intimate writing is about the cabins and camp sites she sets up, cooking and keeping herself as comfortable as possible. She is good at nesting, bringing her adventure down to earth.

While she records many animal and bird sightings, including wolverine, wolf and bear, on this trip Sutherland does not have any dangerous encounters. She writes of her fears, however. She uses her knowledge of tides and her topographical maps to keep herself located, but paddling eight hours a day, often against a headwind, was hard. The first half hour of the day was tough, but then she found her steady, rhythmic stroke. Stamina, not muscle strength, kept her going. She always had a goal for the day and at night rewarded herself with hot food and a carefully prepared bed. Finding a well-fitted out cabin among those she had rented through the Tongass National Forest or a hot spring were rare pleasures. She always tried to leave firewood ready for the next camper.

In the years to come, Sutherland traveled to Japan, Scandinavia, Ireland and France, as well as returning to Alaska. Some of her journeys are driven by literature, some by interest in natural phenomena, some by the desire to know more about wine and vineyards. Her only other writing, however, relates to informative books about kayaking. She continued to live in the same house on the north shore of Oahu until her death in 2015. One of her sons, Jock Sutherland, has been named among the 50 best surfers of all time.

Not myself an adventurer, what I found inspiring about her work was the nesting which she did as she traveled. Paddling North is full of useful ways of doing things and thinking about things, a thoroughly rounded story. Its tone is intimate and friendly. Being outdoors all day Sutherland became part of the sea and animal world. “I forgot I was human,” she writes.

Hilda of Whitby

Hilda of Whitby lived from 614-680 A.D. She was said to have ruled the abbeys and farms she controlled in the north of England so well that population increased. This intrigues me, and I find I am not the only one!

Most of what we know about Hilda of Whitby was written in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede. When her father was poisoned, her mother took Hild and her sister Hereswith to live under the protection of King Edwin, who was then Anglo-Saxon over-King of Northumbria. Edwin was baptized by the Italian bishop Paulinus, along with all of his household when Hild was 13. The baptism took place in a building on the site of what is now York Minster. Edwin was killed in battle, however, in an uprising of the Britons from the west a few years later, in 633.

His queen, along with Hild and her mother fled south to Kent, where Hild’s sister Hereswith lived with her family. Roman Christianity was more firmly entrenched in Kent, but we lose sight of Hild until she was 33, when she went back to Northumbria as a nun in a Celtic monastery, under Bishop Aidan from Lindisfarne. Ten years later she founded Whitby Abbey. In the Celtic tradition, both men and women lived there separately, holding everything in common and worshipping together.

Hild was a skilled administrator and teacher. According to Bede, “all who knew her called her mother because of her outstanding devotion and grace.” In 664 a convention gathered at Whitby to address some of the differences which had arisen between Roman and Celtic Christianity. In regard to the day on which Easter should be celebrated and questions about tonsure, Roman traditions won out and some of the monks returned to Iona and Lindisfarne. 

Hild remained at Whitby until her death at 66, a very old age in those times. She was canonized as a saint with her feast day celebrated on November 17. As the patron saint of learning and culture, many schools and colleges bear her name.

The story of Hild is told in a masterful way by Nicola Griffith, who grew up in northern England. Her book is entitled simply Hild. Griffith has done a great deal of research into the history of the royal houses of the Seventh century, which came from British or Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Pict and other assorted backgrounds. It was a brutal time, in which rulers moved among their subjects, collecting tribute and fighting with each other. Though Edwin and his court were baptized, there is little evidence that Christianity changed anything at the time. The rulers who came after Edwin reverted to their previous gods. 

Since nothing is known of Hild for many years, Griffith sets her in the context of an ambitious mother who seeks to protect her child by making her into a “seer” for the king. The child Hild is extremely observant of the birds, the weather and knows the strengths and weaknesses of the people around her. She grows up strong, knows many of the languages used in a polyglot culture and learns how to read from a priest who tutors her. She is also beloved of her half-brother, her gemaccae (a girlfriend and weaving partner) and the household she creates around her at a young age. Griffith’s harrowing and beautiful story ends before the death of Edwin the king. Griffith expects to complete two more volumes on Hild’s life.

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag, 1968

It is possible you have never heard of Susan Sontag, but for someone of my generation, that would be unlikely. During most of her life [1933-2004], Susan was a powerful force, writing and publishing articles and books which generated cultural conversations, dominating the literary landscape.

Born in New York to a father who died when she was five, and a mother who remarried, Susan lived in many places, finding her strength in books. She got her first degree from the University of Chicago’s great books program at 18. She married Philip Rieff and had a son, David, at age 17. She went on to get an M.A. in Philosophy at Harvard and made her living teaching until she received a fellowship to Oxford, where she escaped to spend time alone, there and in Paris.

Returning to New York in 1959, Susan established herself as a writer. She first became widely known for “Notes on Camp,” which discussed high and low culture and its relative seriousness. In Against Interpretation, she described how the critique of art by intellectuals had taken over the enjoyment of it. She went to Hanoi in 1968 and wrote about her trip positively.

In 1975, Susan was diagnosed with cancer and went through aggressive treatment for it. She never stopped working, however, publishing On Photography in 1977. In this essay, which became a book, she describes the consumerist result of the proliferation of images and how it levels all experiences. In Illness as Metaphor, she describes how victims were blamed for their illness, in the case of cancer or tuberculosis, adding to their suffering. These books had big impacts on the way photography and cancer were discussed.

Susan was also writing fiction and making films at the time, though these works were not as widely known. She was a powerful, “fierce,” figure among New York intellectuals, becoming president of the PEN American Center. When a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie for blasphemy, Susan supported him, rallying writers to his cause. She was also a great friend of Joseph Brodsky, a Russian dissident who ended up in New York. Brodsky had an uncompromising value for literature similar to Susan’s. Literature tamed people. It sensitized and humanized them. Susan felt Brodsky was one of the few people with standards as high as her own.

Susan had many relationships with both men and women. In 1989 she met the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was almost as famous as she. Susan would not admit to their relationship, as she did not want to be labeled, but according to Annie, they helped each other through their lives until Susan’s death in 2004.

In 1992, Sarajevo was beseiged for four years. Susan lived for long periods of time in the city during the siege, and mounted Waiting for Godot while there. “No one cared about us,” said the residents, “except Susan. Her presence was very helpful.” It was Susan’s way of saying, “culture is something worth dying for.”

The relation of language to reality was Susan’s theme, suggests Benjamin Moser, whose biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, came out in 2019. Neither is stable and over the course of her life there was much change. “Literature is the passport to a larger life,” Susan said, when she was given the German Peace Prize in 2004. “Literature is freedom, especially in a time when reading and inwardness are challenged.”

In 2004, in response to a cancer of the blood, Susan again fought aggressively. She tried to put mind over matter, had a bone marrow transplant, but it did not succeed. She was buried in Paris.

I mostly experienced Susan’s work as it appeared in The New York Review of Books, following her story at a distance. But she did inspire me, particularly in the value for seriousness and literature, which I too regard as foundational.

Kathryn Kontent Hollingsworth

"Portrait of a Young Woman Reading," 1938 by G.B. Barlow

Katya Kontent, whose story is told in The Rules of Civility [2011] by Amor Towles, grows up in Brooklyn with a Russian immigrant father. Her mother abandons them and at 19, Katya’s father dies, leaving her almost without family. By this time, however, she has a job doing typing and stenography for an attorney in New York and lives in a boardinghouse with her roommate Eve.

At 24, Katey and Eve are ready to take the town by storm. It is 1938 and the Depression is waning. They go out for a drink in a jazz club and meet an attractive man, Tinker Grey, who leaves them with his address and a gold lighter. At lunch one day, in the hole in the wall diner Katey enjoys, Tinker turns up and they talk. Katey falls in love with him. But an accident, in which the car the three of them were sharing is hit by a milk truck and Eve is badly injured, makes Tinker, who was driving, take responsibility for her. Eve recuperates at his apartment, and soon they are off to Palm Beach and then Europe. Katey is left to her books (often Dickens) and games of contract bridge, which she plays with herself in her apartment on the lower East Side.

During a bleak winter, Katey runs into Tinker’s brother, a painter. “Place no trust in appearances,” she is told. She also meets Ann Grandyn, Tinker’s “godmother.” By June, she is given a promotion, becoming the top secretary at her firm. On June 21, her birthday, she buys a new dress, shoes and clutch and goes out to dinner by herself at La Belle Epoch. Unlike her father, who thought restaurants an “ungodly waste,” Katey feels they are the height of civilization. “A fine dinner could revive the spirits.”

Katey quits her job and talks herself into a job at Pembroke Press. Here, the workers don’t need their jobs, don’t care what they are paid, as they have family money. Very quickly she is snapped up by the editor of a new magazine. Gotham is a Conde Nast publication of cultural demolition, clearing the way for something new. In a week, Katey’s life in New York has “come about.”

Katey’s new friends are very well off. Wallace, who is kind, steady and sincere, takes her shooting. He is planning to leave to fight in the Spanish Civil War, however. Katey and he shop for his Christmas gifts to his family in August, wrapping them and squirreling them away. Katey hears that Tinker and Eve will become engaged. She secures an invitation to the Hollingsworth Labor Day picnic on Long Island. When she finds that Tinker and Eve are there, she leaves for the train, but her host sends her home in a car with his son, Valentine. The radio is playing “Autumn in New York.”

Eve, it turns out, has refused Tinker and run away. She keeps running, all the way to California. Katey notices that Tinker is relieved. He invites Katey to come see him at Wallace's hunting camp, where he is building fires and reading Thoreau. They spend the night together, and Tinker invites her to meet him at a club on Monday night. Katey joyously prepares, but at lunch she runs into Tinker and Ann Grandyn, who is clearly much more than a “godmother.” Katey slaps him and ends up telling her friend the whole story.

Tinker tries to apologize; he was actually bidding Ann and the many things she provided him with goodbye. But Katey has been badly hurt. She goes out with others and runs again into Tinker’s brother. “My old man lost everything,” he tells her. “Tinker was sent to school, learned five languages. What he’s got can’t be taught in schools.” Katey knows this. Tinker is vibrant, fearless, naïve. Katey admits that she loves him.

Katey finds Tinker in the flophouse where his brother lived near the docks. His brother has enlisted. Tinker is not downcast or unraveled. Katey apologizes and they have lovely times together until Tinker sets off to find his way to unfettered openness. “I’m going to try the present on for size.” Katey keeps her eyes open, but she does not run into him again.

Katey continues to work for Gotham, the Depression ending as 1940 arrives. Wallace dies in Spain and bequeaths Katey $800 a year, enough so that she can continue to live with integrity and no regrets. In 1947 she is introduced to Val Hollingsworth, who remembers their drive, listening to “Autumn in New York.” She becomes editor of Gotham in 1955. In 1966, she and Val go to an exhibit of Walker Evans’ photographs of people on the subway, taken in 1938. Katey spots Tinker, twice. Once in his cashmere coat, looking rich, and later looking scruffy and happy.

Amor Towles' wonderful book is a love poem to New York, replete with all kinds of characters. “Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out?” But it is also the story of a young working class woman who maintains her dignity. On her way up, she does not do anything against her true feelings, does not demean herself. Dignity is under-rated, in my estimation. Katey’s father has left her with this advice: “One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition, and all manner of glamorous enticements.” She does not tell her husband about what happened between her and Tinker, keeping the memory of her 24^th year to herself. She has no regrets, though she does note that “the right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.” As physical creatures, we can only live one life.

Jia Tanchun

Wenying Dongfang, 1987 television series

The Story of the Stone, also called The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xuequin [first printed 1791] is well-known as the story of a young man, Bao-yu, living in a large Confucian household torn between the love of a gifted, difficult poet, Lin Dai-yu, and his fated marriage to a more measured, beautiful woman, Xue Bao-chai. Hundreds of characters with many complex stories fill the pages of this classical Chinese novel, which we most likely read in the David Hawkes translation. The novel has spawned its own study, “redology,” and endless debates are held about which of the two beauties is the better match for Bao-yu. Interesting as all this is, for me, the woman with her feet most on the ground, and a way into the story, is Bao-yu’s half-sister Tanchun.

Tanchun is one of the “twelve beauties” Bao-yu dreams of early in the book. One of the three “springs,” her name means “seeking spring.” Like Lin Dai-yu, she is a wonderful poet, but also she has managerial ability and can restore balance to a situation. Her mother, Auntie Zhao, is a concubine, and an unlikeable character, which dims Tanchun’s prospects. But Tanchun makes the most of her life and is one of the most successful beauties in the end.

As the story opens, Bao-yu, his cousins and relatives are quite young. The two branches of the Jia family live in adjoining mansions, each housing perhaps 300 people. One of their number has become consort to the emperor, so the families create a garden between the mansions, suitable as a residence for her when she comes to visit. The garden is pronounced lovely, but Jia Xuanchun says that the garden should not be left empty. Bao-yu and his young cousins, siblings and servants all move into it.

Bao-yu is supposed to be studying the Confucian classics, as directed by his father. But he refuses, spending his time idly, getting mixed up in intrigues and writing poetry. Bao-yu is the mouthpiece of the writer, Cao Xuequin, himself the scion of a great house about which he wrote with nostalgia as it went into decline. The book is a critique of society, castigating the Confucian scholar ruling class of the time with hypocrisy and lack of feeling. Those who study only to move up in the world are “career worms,” in Bao-yu’s eyes. Confucians felt passion was bad and must be quelled, but Bao-yu is interested in authenticity, finding the genuine feelings in one’s nature. Without passion, one is hardly a man. Thus his feelings for the romantic Dai-yu.

While living in the garden, Tanchun proposes a poetry club. When someone walks by with a pot of crabflowers, this name is attached to the club. Tanchun lives in the Autumn studio, where she paints and writes poetry. Under the benevolent eye of Grandmother Jia, the young people play games, go boating on the lake, watch plays and participate in ceremonies and festivals. When Wang Xi-feng, the spirited woman who manages the house, becomes ill, Tanchun learns to fill her shoes. Partly through the machinations of Wang Xi-feng, and certainly due to some of the wrongdoing of the greedy, lascivious and lazy members of the household, the Jia family falls into decline. When dealing with the quarrels, petty rivalries and outright fights, Tanchun says more than once that she wishes she lived with fewer people!

The climax of the book in reached with Bao-yu’s marriage. Everyone in the Jia household becomes involved in the deception. About this time, Zhou Qiong, a military man from the Haimen Coastal Region, asks for Tanchun’s hand. Tanchun must travel far to the south. A year or so later, at a tumultuous time, when Bao-yu cannot be found after his examinations and the only daughter of Wang Xi-feng is also missing, Tanchun and her husband return for a visit. “She had always been gifted with a knack of finding the right thing to say, and her natural equanimity restored a degree of calm to the gatherng.”

When visiting Hong Kong, I made a friend of a young girl whom I met in the street with a thick red book under her arm. Sure enough, it was a copy of Dream of the Red Chamber. I asked her about it! We met several times so she could practice her English. The book is a realistic depiction of the life of its time, but is also full of overtones of Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. An opera made of the work opened in San Francisco in 2016. I have found whole courses in English on “redology,” such as these by Anthony E. Clark of Whitworth University. Clark expounds on the language, the story, the philosophy and history of the book. I wish you the joy of reading it yourself and finding your own favorite character. I could tell that Professor Clark loved best Wang Xi-feng, the “fox fairy.”

Helen Knothe Nearing

Helen Knothe was born into a theosophist family in New Jersey in 1904. She did not want a traditional American education, but went to Europe to study the violin. While there she had a relationship and traveled with the young Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Upon her return to the United States, still uncertain what she wanted to do with her life, she met Scott Nearing. Scott, 20 years older, was at the nadir of his life, having been asked to leave two universities for his radical economic and pacifist views, and tried for espionage for “obstructing the enlistment” of men into the Army in 1918. Scott was a prolific writer and speaker and Helen became his secretary and companion. They lived in New York until Scott bought property in 1934 in Vermont which he and Helen called “Forest Farm.”

Helen was a life-long vegetarian and Scott had become one. They wanted to live simply and self-reliantly, as much as possible. They began gardening and harvesting maple sugar which they sold as a cash crop. Each day was divided into three parts, one part for what they called “bread labor (gardening, chopping wood, building in stone),” one part for community work (writing and publishing) and one part for self improvement (educating themselves). In the winter, Scott continued to travel and speak and Helen wrote and published books, the first being The Maple Sugar Book, which described their sugaring techniques.

Helen’s biographer Ellen La Conte says she was an excellent salesman and publicist, with a considerable amount of “hustle.” In addition to writing books, they built nine stone buildings on the farm. Helen had never done physical work but she took to it, gardening, composting, working with wood. She loved building with stone, and became the person who did the pointing, laying in lime or cement mortar between stones.

When their home became part of a holiday ski area, the Nearings moved to Maine, to Cape Rosier, where their cash crop was raising blueberries. Living the Good Life was published in 1954 and it drew countless people to the farm to study the Nearings’ lifestyle. The Nearings were generous, feeding their visitors and getting them to help build roads, buildings and gardens. They lived a very public life, setting high standards for themselves and others, and publishing many more books. Their homesteads had no electricity, used composting outhouses and were heated with wood. Communication was by mail.

When Scott was in his 90’s and Helen in her 70’s, they built their last stone home, publishing Our Home Made of Stone in 1983. By this time Helen was making most of the decisions. She had help with carpentry, but she designed the place and did all the pointing. This last home, also called Forest Farm, has become the Good Life Center, an institute for education. Scott died in 1983 at 100 years of age, and Helen followed in 1995.

I love many things about the way the Nearings lived, and especially Our Home Made of Stone, which is mostly photographs. I have always hoped to one day build a stone house! Biographical materials on Helen are plentiful. She appears in many Youtube videos, including this one. Her own writing on “the good life” is straightforward and practical.

Tereza

Juliette Binoche as Tereza

Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984] portrays Tereza as the weight which comes to his protagonist Tomas as an ‘It must be.’ Tomas prefers lightness, but “the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

Tereza meets Tomas when he comes to the bar where she is working. He sits alone with a book and asks for a cognac. Beethoven is playing on the radio. Tereza, who went to work at 15 to help her family, sees in Tomas a representative of what she has always longed for: a higher culture. “Lives are composed like music, guided by musical motifs,” Kundera tells us. “Without realizing it, an individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Tereza goes to Prague and knocks at Tomas’ door. He lets her in, feeling that she is a baby in a bullrush basket, sent down the river to meet him.

This meeting takes place in the mid-1960’s. Tereza moves in with Tomas. His friend Sabine finds Tereza a job on a magazine. Seeing promise in her, Sabine shows her photographs, what is important about each. Tereza takes up the camera and becomes a staff photographer. When the Russians move tanks in to Prague in 1968, repressing Czechoslovakia, Tereza roams the streets, photographing what is happening and handing her film to foreigners to take out of the country.

Sabine moves to Switzerland, and Tomas and Tereza soon follow. Tomas is a surgeon in a hospital. He is happy and feels free and much lighter. But being in a foreign country is like walking a tightrope. Tereza cannot handle the vertigo. She goes back to Prague, feeling weak. Tomas follows her, giving up his passport. Neither of them can leave Czechoslovakia again.

In Prague, both Tomas and Tereza feel the crushing weight of living under communist ideology. Tereza works as a waitress because she cannot be forgiven for giving her film to foreigners. Tomas is asked to retract an article he once wrote, but he will not. He is discharged from his job as a surgeon and takes up window washing. This job feels like a vacation, and he gives in to his adulterous delight in the bodies of women he meets. It makes Tereza miserable. She too has an adventure which seems to be a set up to get her to inform on her customers. Tereza and Tomas hardly see each other except in sleep.

Two years after leaving the hospital, Tomas is physically tired. “Prague has grown so ugly lately,” he tells Tereza. They talk of moving and find work on a communal farm in the country. Tereza minds the heifers, which are turned out each day to pasture, with the help of her dog Karenin. Tomas drives the pickup which takes workers out to the fields. The police stop pestering them, but they are unusual. Other communal farm workers find it is just a job and wish to move to the city. Instead of going dancing, at night they watch television in their homes. Tereza takes comfort among the animals, however. Animals love voluntarily.

When Karenin dies, Tomas and Tereza bury him between the crooked apple trees. Left to her thoughts, Tereza feels responsible for Tomas. It is her fault he moved back from Switzerland. She has used her weakness against him. She is afraid he is bored with her. But, one day she puts on a pretty dress and they go to the next town to dance. “Haven’t you noticed that I’m happy here?” Tomas asks her. Their death in an automobile accident is reported to Sabine by Tomas’ estranged son.

Kundera’s philosophical novel gives him a chance to present his thoughts on many subjects, including a diatribe against kitsch. Kitsch fills Sabine with horror. But Kundera feels it may be inescapable. “The novel is not the author’s confession. It is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

Though I loved the movie made of this novel by Philip Kaufman in 1988, Kundera repudiated it. I suspect that the movie did not portray the heaviness of the Russian occupation to the extent we see it in the novel. Tereza remains a finely wrought icon and the contrast Kundera sets up between her character and that of Sabine an interesting question.